Sunday, October 27, 2013

+ I must be in an ornery mood
lately. Last week, in my sermon, I actually mentioned cracking my knuckles. And
I got some major feedback about my feistiness and knuckle cracking. I’m still
in that mood this week.

Partly I am because, I saw
someone on Facebook say something that really set me off. For all
my years in the church, there is one thing you can almost guarantee will set me
off. In fact, you’ve no doubt heard me go off about this before. But one of the
things some people in the church love to say is something that I simply cannot
stand. You’ve heard this phrase before,
I know. The phrase is this.

“I love the sinner, but I hate
the sin.”

Grrrr. My blood runs cold when I
hear such a thing.

Now, to be fair, people who say
it feel they are saying something kind and selfless. But the reality is it
really isn’t kind. Or selfless. It is, quite simply, self-righteous statement.
And it’s a terribly judgmental thing to say.

When we say such things, we end
up sounding very much like the proud Pharisee in Jesus’ parable this morning. That stupid phrase just makes no sense to me.

I love the sinner, but I hate their
sin.

It sounds too much like we are
saying, I am just so thankful that I am
not sinning in that same way. And most times, the so-called “sin” the person hates,
is really a sin they themselves are not guilty of.

And that is the real rub here. How
easy it is for any of us to say we hate someone else’s sin, when it isn’t our
sin. OK. I need to get over this feistiness.

I just need to relax and let
things like this go. And I need to remind myself of what to do in those
situations when I confront someone’s sin in a way in which I really do hate
their particular sin (which, yes, happens). In those moments when I am confronted
with what seems like someone’s else’s sin, I realize what I have to do is the
example of the tax collector in our Gospel reading for today.

I too need to beat my breast and say,
“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

It’s probably one of the purest and more honest prayers we can make. And what I
love even more about this parable is the fact that the prayer of the Pharisee
isn’t even necessarily a bad prayer in and of itself. I mean, there’s an
honesty in it.

The Pharisee is the religious
one. He is the one who is doing right according to organized religion. He is doing what Pharisees do; he is doing the
“right” thing; he is filling his prayer with thanksgiving to God. We should all thank God for all the good things
God grants us.

The problem arises in the fact
that the prayer is so horribly self-righteous and self-indulgent that it
manages to cancel out the rightness of the prayer. The arrogance of the prayer
essentially renders it null and void. The tax collector’s prayer however is so
pure. It is simple and straight-to-the-point. This is the kind of prayer Jesus
again and again holds up as an ideal form of prayer. But what gives it its
punch is that is a prayer of absolute humility.

And humility is the key here. It
gives the prayer just that extra touch. There
is no doubt in our minds as we hear this parable that God hears—and grants—this
prayer, even though it is being prayed by someone considered to be the exact
opposite of the Pharisee. Whereas the Pharisee is the religious one, the
righteous one, the tax collector, handling all that pagan unclean money of the conquerors,
is unclean. He is an outcast.

Humility really is the key.

And it is one of the things, speaking
only for myself here, that I am sometimes lacking in my own spiritual life. But,
humility is important. It is essential to us as followers of Jesus.

St. Teresa of Avila, the great
Carmelite saint, once said, “Humility, humility. In this way we let our Lord
conquer, so that he hears our prayer.”

I think we’re all a bit guilty of lacking humility in our own lives, certainly
in our spiritual lives and in being self-righteous when it comes to sin. We all
occasionally take some delight, as the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable does, in the
shortcomings and failures of others. We
watch with almost gleeful joy when politicians are involved in scandals, or
movie stars get in trouble with drugs or the law, or even when clergy fall and
fall hard.

In those moments I find myself saying: “Thank God it’s them and not me.”

And maybe that’s an honest prayer
to make. Because what we also say in that prayer is that we, too, are capable
of being just that guilty.

There but for the grace of God go
I, we may say.

We all have a shadow side. There’s
no way around that fact. But the fact
is, the only sins we’re responsible for ultimately are our own sins—not the
sins of others. We can’t pay the price of other’s sins—only Jesus can and has
done that—nor should we delight in the failings of others.

I remember reading a saying once
by an Eastern Orthodox saint, Barsanufios. He said, “”He who recognizes his own stench in
his nose cannot recognize any other smell even if he stands on a pile of dead
bodies.”

Yes, it’s a disgusting image, but it strikes home. All we can do as Christians,
sometimes, is humble ourselves. Again and again. We must learn to overlook what
others are doing and concentrate on what we ourselves are doing wrong. And when we recognize what we are doing wrong,
we need to struggle to correct those wrongs and to strive to do right. And that’s
hard work. It’s sometimes impossible work.

It exhausts me. And so I don’t know
why I would want to deal with other’s sins if my own sins exhaust me.

There are too many self-righteous
Christians in the world. We know them. They
frustrate us. And they irritate us. We don’t need anymore. What we need are more
humble, contrite Christians. We need to
be Christians who don’t see anyone as inferior to us—as charity cases to whom
we can share our wealth and privileges.

Rather, to paraphrase the great St. Therese of Lisieux: we should sit down with
sinners, not as their benefactors but as the “most wretched of them all.”

That is true humility. We should
because we are. In our own eyes, if we carry true humility within us, if we are
our own stiffest and most objective judges, then we know that we are the most
wretched of them all and that we are in no place to condemn others, nor are we
in a place to hate the sins of others—only our own sins.

In dealing with others, we have
no other options than just simply to love those people Sin or no sin, we must
simply love them and hate our own sins.That
is what it means to be a true follower of Jesus. It is essential if we are
going to truly love those we are called by Jesus to love and it is essential to
our sense of honesty before God.

So, let us steer clear of such self-righteousness as hating other people’s sins
and let us draw whatever hatred we might have within us onto our own failings
and shortcomings—not so we can beat ourselves up and be self-deprecating, but
so we can overcome our shortcomings and rise above them. Let us look at others
with pure eyes—with eyes of love. Let us not see the sins of others, but the
light and love of God permeating through them, no matter who they are. And with
this perception, let us realize that all of us who have been humbled will be
lifted up by God and exalted in ways so wonderful we cannot even begin to
fathom them in this moment.

Monday, October 21, 2013

+ Last evening our Diocesan Convention delegates limped home from Diocesan
Convention. I think that’s an apt image. It was…well…let’s just say, as Cathy
McMullen said last night, an “interesting” convention. Quite a bit contentious
on some levels.

But I’m a person who has a
somewhat love/hate relationship regarding Diocesan Conventions. I have been to
too many of them in my life. On one level, for an extrovert like me, I can say
that I always have a good time, no matter how contentious the convention might
get. And this one was no exception.

But I must say, thatmuch the real gist of what happens at
Convention happens not on the convention floor. Or at the Convention
Eucharist.Oh no. It happens at the
meals. And it happens, yes, in the bar.

It just so happened that one of
the most interesting conversations for me happened at the bar on Friday night.
It seems that out little congregation of St. Stephen’s has been getting some
notice in the diocese. Notice as a progressive, dare I say, “upstart” kind of
congregation.

One of the conversation I had was
with a deacon from another congregation. She and I have been friends for a very
long time. We are still very dear friends.

But, during the course of the
night, she said to me, “Jamie, I just don’t understand how, in scripture, you
can defend being essentially a liberal, progressive congregation that welcomes
all people.”

She said “welcoming” in a kind of
derisive way, like it’s a bad thing. As in, “are you saying our congregation is
‘unwelcoming?’”

When I asked her why she had such
issue with our supposedly progressive/liberal attitudes, she said, “I just
believeScripture is clear about certain
things that you profess in your congregation to welcome and embrace.”

We all know where she was going
with this. I certainly did anyway.

I said to her, in no uncertain
terms, “Be careful, my friend, where you go with this. This is slippery slope,
using scripture in such a way.”

“As long as I go with Scripture I
will never be wrong,” she said. “Scripture cuts through everything. And with
scripture as my guide, as the sword in my hand, I have no need to be careful.”

I smiled. And then I said, you
are right. I will concede that. Scripture IS a sword. A two-edged sword,
especially for those who use it as a weapon.

And then I very gently warned
her, If our intention is to cut people with the swords of scripture, just be
prepared that we too will in turn be cut. That is what scripture does when we
misuse it.But if we use scripture as it
meant to be used—as an object of love—then it is also two-edged.If we use it as way of open the channels of
God’s love to others, then the channels of God’s love will be opened to us as
well.

That, let’s just say, essentially
ended out conversion. We, of course, parted friends as we always have. But when
it comes to people using scripture as the basis for an arguments such as this,
I love crack the knuckles.

I hope it doesn’t surprise anyone
here this morning that I truly do love the Bible.I mean, what kind of priest would I be if I
didn’t love the Scriptures? After all, one of the vows I made when I was
ordained as a Deacon and later reaffirmed when I was ordained a Priest was this
(and renewed these vows yesterday at the Convention Eucharist):

“I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to
salvation…”

Now, that might sound like a somewhat fundamentalist view of such things. The
scriptures are the Word of God? you might ask.Even with all the apparent flaws and contradictions? And it contains
everything necessary for salvation?Come
on. But I do believe these statements—though not in a fundamentalist way of
thinking.

If we look in our Prayer Book, as
we do on a very regular basis, back in that place I like to direct us to go
sometimes—the Catechism—we find a little expansion on this thinking. On page
853, you will find this question:

“Why do we call the Holy Scriptures the Word of God?”

The answer:

“We call the Holy Scriptures the Word of God because God inspired their human
authors and because God still speaks through the Bible.”

I think that is a wonderfully down-to-earth, practical and rational
explanation.

In our “Episcopal 101” classes
that we do here on a regular basis and several of you have taken,we have been having fun exploring what
Anglicanism and the Episcopal Church are.One of those fun ones for me, anyway, is what is called Richard Hooker’s
three-legged stool.Some of you might
remember this.

Richard Hooker was a great 16th Century Anglican theologian. He explained that
Anglican belief was based not on “The Church Alone” of the Roman Catholic
Church nor even on “The Word Alone” of some Protestants, but is in fact based
on a more balanced view.

The three legs of the stool of
Anglicanism are Scripture, Tradition and Reason.Take one of those legs away, the stool
wobbles and falls.But use all three and
you will have a very a balanced view of religion. For example, if we only have
Scripture, without Reason or Tradition, we end up with what I consider the
heresy of fundamentalism.

And it is a heresy. Anytime we
place anything on par with God—any time we claim anything is perfect and
without flaw, except God—we have a created an idol. My view is that
fundamentalists have made the Bible into an idol.

But for us Episcopalians, our view of scripture is based on a balance of
tradition and reason. We can’t just believe anything we want with regard to
Scripture.There are scriptures that we
don’t like hearing. But none of gets to edit the Bible.We don’t get to cross out those things we
don’t like. We have to confront them and meet them face-on. And we have to
wrestle them and in wrestling with them we must use a good dose of reason, and
a good dose of tradition.And if we do
that, we come away from those difficult scriptures with a new sense of what
they say to us.

For example,I personally might not like
what the ApostlePaul says sometimes—I
might not even agree with it—but, good or bad, it isn’t up to me.Or any of one of us.It’s up to the Church, of which we, as
individuals, are one part and parcel. For us Episcopalians, we don’t have to
despair over those things Paul says that might offend our delicate 21st century
ears. We just need to remind ourselves that our beliefs about Scripture are
based on a rational approach tempered with the tradition of the Church.

In fact, if we continue reading
on page 853 in the Catechism, we will find this answer to the question, “How do
we understand the meaning of the Bible?”

The answer:

“We understand the meaning of the Bible by the help of the Holy Spirit, who
guides the Church in the true interpretation of Scripture.”

There you see a very solid approach to understanding Scripture.Reason (in this sense the inspiration of the
Spirit), along with the Church (or Tradition) helps us in interpreting
Scripture.Such thinking prevents us
from falling into that awful muck of fundamentalism.Such thinking steers us clear of this
misconception that that the Scriptures are without flaw. Such thinking also
steers clear of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, with regard to
Scripture as well.

Sometimes, if we use too much reason in our approach to Scripture, we find
ourselves reasoning it all away and it becomes nothing but a quaint book of
myths, morals and legends.

Yes, the Scriptures are not
without flaws. As God-inspired as they might be, they were written by human
beings. Pre-scientific human beings, writing in a language that has been
translated and retranslated over and over again.And human beings have been notorious—even in
Scripture—of not always being able to get everything perfect, no matter how
God-inspired they are. Not even Scripture expects us to be perfect.

But, the second part our explanation of the question from the Catechism of why
we call Holy Scripture the Word of God is even more important to me.

“God stills peaks to us through scripture.”

I love the idea that God does still speak to us through these God-inspired
writings by flawed human beings. And what God speaks to us through Scriptures
is, again and again, a message of love, even in the midst of some of the more
violent, or fantastic stories we read in Scripture.

Now, one of those flawed human beings in the Bible was of course, the Apostle
Paul.Paul himself would admit, on one
of his less grandiose days, that he was a flawed person.And I love the fact that, this morning, God
seems to be speaking loud and clear through Paul in his letter to Timothy.

“All scripture is inspired by God,” Paul instructs, “and is useful for
teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so
that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good
work.”

I love that. That is some rational, solid thinking, if you ask me. Scripture
here is intended not to condemn, not bash, not to hurt, but to build up and
equip us for “every good work.”

“Proclaim the message, “ he tells
Timothy (and us), “be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorably;
convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching.”

For any of who have been teachers, those words strike home. But, if you notice,
nowhere does Paul say we must condemn or pound down, or coerce others using
Scripture.

Scripture must build up and
encourage and teach us to serve and to love.And Scripture must be a conduit through which God continues to speak to
us.

So, let us embrace this balanced and reasonable very Anglican approach to
Scripture. Let us listen to Scripture and hear the Word of God speaking to us
through it. Let us continue to place the Scriptures at the center of our lives
and let us allow them to guide us into a pathway of love and service.And, most importantly, let us use it, again
and again, as an instrument of love rather than a weapon of war and
hatred.And when we do, we will find
that the two-edged sword of that instrument of love, will open the doors of
God’s love to us as well.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

+ I was
once accused, many, many years ago, of being—if you can believe this—morbid. Morbid?
Me? I didn’t even know what morbid really meant when I was first accused of it.
But this friend of mine said I was
morbid because, “Well, Jamie, you like to hang out in cemeteries.”

Guilty as
charged! I do like cemeteries. I very unapologetically will admit to that. They’re
great places. They’re not spooky or morbid to me at all. For a history buff like me, they are
perpetually engaging.

Well,
yesterday, I was at a cemetery. Yesterday,
my family gathered at Maple Sheyenne Cemetery to dedicate my brother’s
gravestone. For those who might not know, my brother died very suddenly at the
end of July in Colorado. So, we gathered
on Saturday to dedicated and bless the stone that covers the place his ashes
are buried, using a beautiful liturgy from the Anglican Prayer Book of New
Zealand.

After the
service, we stood around talking a bit and looking at the nearby stones. As my
family was looking at my father’s gravestone, they realized that, on the back of
it, there is my inscription.

OK. You
know what… Maybe I am a bit morbid. I actually have my gravestone inscribed
already. Yeah, that might be a bit morbid.

Actually,
no. It’s just practical. I had the inscription
put on it not long after I went through cancer about twelve years ago.

As we were
looking it, I realized that one thing I had always intended to have inscribed
on it was a very popular Anglo-Catholic inscription. At my seminary, Nashotah
House, in the cemetery there, many of the stones carried a very brief, but
beautiful epitaph:

Jesu,
Mercy.

And I’ve
always wanted that inscription on my stone as well. Because I love that phrase.

Jesu,
Mercy.

I love it
because I really love that word, Mercy. It’s an incredible word.

Mercy.

And it’s
one that I think sums up so many of the prayers we pray. Certainly, the prayers
I pray. In those moments in which I am overwhelmed or exhausted or simply don’t
know what to pray, I often find myself just praying, Jesus, have mercy on me.

Today, in
our Gospel reading, we find that word, Mercy, in a very prominent place. In
fact the prayer the leper prays to Jesus is the pray any of, in our deepest
moment of moments, finds ourselves praying.

“Jesus,
Master, have mercy on me!”

And he
does. We see, in our Gospel reading
today, mercy in action. And it is
wonderful. These lepers are healed.

But,
before we lose track of this story, let’s take a little deeper look. Now, first of all, we need to be clear about
who lepers were in that day. Lepers were unclean according to Jewish Law. But
they were worse than that. They were contagiously unclean. And their disease
was considered a very severe punishment for something. So, to even engage these
lepers was a huge deal.

But, the
real interesting aspect of this story is what you might not have noticed. The
lepers themselves are interesting. There are, of course, ten of them. Nine lepers
who were, it seems, children of Israel. And one Samaritan leper.

Now a Samaritan,
for good Jews like Jesus, would have been a double curse. But the nine other lepers,
knowing who they are and what they are, do the “right” thing. Again and again,
throughout the story they do the right thing. They first of all stand far off
from Jesus and the others. That’s what contagious people do. And when they are
healed, the nine also do the right thing. They heed Jesus’ words and, like good
Jews, they head off to the priest to be declared clean. The only “wrong” thing
they do is that, before heading off to the priest, they don’t first thank
Jesus.

Only the
Samaritan stays. And the reason he stays
is because, as Samaritan, he wouldn’t need to approach the Jewish priest. So,
he turns back. And he engages the One
who healed him. He bows down before
Jesus and worships him. Jesus is irritated by the fact the others did not come
back.

But, if
notice, his mercy remained. They—along with the Samaritan—remain healed.

That is
how mercy works. The interesting thing for us is, we are not always so good at
mercy. We are good as being vindictive, especially to those who have wronged
us. We are very good as seeking to make others lives as miserable as our lives
are at times. But we are not so good at mercy, especially mercy to those who
have turned away from us and walked away after we have showed mercy to them.

Luckily,
none of us are Jesus. Luckily, none of us are God incarnate. Luckily, none of
us will be the ultimate Judge of such things. Because the One who is Judge all
of things, is a master at mercy.

Still,
we, as followers of that One, are challenged. If the One we follows shows
mercy, we know it is our job to do it as well. No matter what. No matter if
those we show mercy to ignore us and walk away from us. No matter if they show
no gratitude to us for that mercy.

Our job
is not to concern ourselves with such things. Our job, as followers of Jesus,
are simply to show mercy again and again and again. And to seek mercy again and
again and again.

Jesus,
Master have mercy on me.

Jesu,
mercy.

This is
or deepest prayer. This is the prayer of our heart. This is prayer we pray whenour voices and minds no longer function
perfectly. This is the prayer that keeps on praying with every heartbeat within
us. And by praying this prayer, by
living this prayer, by reflecting this prayer to others, we will know. We will
know—beyond a shadow of doubt—that we too can get up and go our way. We too can
know that, yes, our faith has made us well.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

+ It happens rarely. Very rarely. Occasionally, in our collective Christian lives,
there comes along a person. They change things. They rile things up. They
challenge. They step outside the box, a bit.

I know what you’re
thinking. That is soooo Father Jamie. Thank you. But no…I’m not talking about
myself.

No, I am actually
talking about someone who is taking the Christian world—at least here in the
United States—by storm. I am talking about Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. She is a
Lutheran pastor you have heard me talk about a few times before. I first heard
her speak in 2010 in Des Moines, at a Provincial meeting, and was very taken
with her style—she wore a band collar on her sleeveless black clerical shirt which
showed off the tattoos on her arms. (You
all may remember me talking about how much I secretly wish to have a tattoo, if
I wasn’t such awimp—so that kind of
appealed to me)

I am not alone in
my appreciation of her, obviously. Our own Senior Warden, John Baird, a few
weeks ago, visited her church plant in Denver, called The House of All Sinners
and Saints. And when Pastor Nadia spoke
at the Chester Fritz in Grand Forks this past Thursday, our own Sandy Kenz made
the pilgrimage to cheer her on.

Pastor Nadia’s
book, Pastrix, is definitely taking
the Church by storm. Everybody’s talking about this book. I read it while I was
on vacation and liked it very much. It’s full of fresh insight, new ways of
thinking about God and the Church, solid theology—and a fair share of cussing
(everything I like). I will probably be
quoting from this book again and again, but one thing she addressed in her book
was this interesting anecdote.

One time, while in
Clinical pastoral Education, Pastor Nadia visited an elderly woman recovering
from shoulder surgery is she would like he to pay for her.

“Oh that’s nonsense,
dear. I’m an atheist.”

What I loved, was
Pastor Nadia’s response: “Man, good for you. I wish I could pull that off.”

Which is very similar
to the response I have when someone tells me they’re an atheist.

I love atheists, as
many of you know. And I don’t mean, by saying that, that I love them because of
some intent to convert them. No. My love for atheists has simply to do with the
fact that “get” them. I understand them. I appreciate them—even if I don’t
necessarily believe what they say. And I have lots of atheists in my life!

Agnostics and
atheists have always intrigued me. In fact, I was an agnostic, verging on
atheism, once a long time ago in my life. Now to be clear, agnosticism and
atheism are two similar though different aspects of belief or disbelief.

An agnostic—gnostic
meaning knowledge, an “a” in front of it negates that word, so no knowledge of
God—is simply someone who doesn’t know if God exists or not.

And atheist—a theist
is a person who believes in god, an “a” in front of it negates it, so a person
who does not believe God—in someone who simply does not or cannot believe.

You have heard me
say often that we are all agnostics, to some extent. There are things about our
faith we simply—and honestly—don’t know. That’s not a bad thing. It’s actually
a good thing. It keeps us on our toes. I
think agnosticism is an honest response.

But atheism is
interesting and certainly honest too, in this sense. Whenever I ask an atheist
what kind of God they don’t believe in, and they tell me, I, quite honestly,
have to agree. When atheists tell me they don’t believe in some white-bearded
man seated on a throne in some far-off, cloud filled kingdom like some Monty
Python cut-out, I have to say, “I don’t believe in that God either.”

I am an atheist in
regard to that God—that idolatrous god made in our own image. If that’s what an
atheist is, then count me in.

But the God I do believe
in—the God of mystery, the God of wonder and faith and love—now, that God is a
God I can serve and worship. And this God of mystery and love that I serve has,
I believe, chosen to come to us, here in the muck of our lives, and become one
of us in Jesus. Certainly that is not some distant, strange, human-made God. Rather
it is a close, loving, God-made-human.

But there are
issues with such a belief. Believing in a God of mystery means we now have work
cut out for us in cultivating our faith in that God.

“Increase our
faith!” the apostles ask Jesus in today’s Gospel. And two thousand years later,
we—Jesus’ disciples now—are still asking him to essentially do that for us as
well. It’s an honest prayer. We want our faith increased. We want to
believe more fully than we do. We want to believe in a way that will eliminate
doubt, because doubt is so…uncertain. It is a sometimes frightening place to
explore. And we are afraid that with little faith and a lot of doubt, doubt
will win out. We are crying out to Jesus—like those first apostles—for more
than we have.

But Jesus—in that
way that Jesus does—turns it all back on us. He tells us that we shouldn’t be worrying
about increasing our faith. We should
rather be concerned about the mustard seed of faith that we have right now.

Think of that for a
moment. Think of what a mustard seed
really is. It’s one of the smallest
things we can see. It’s a minuscule thing. It’s the side of a period at the end
of a sentence or a dot on a lower-case i. It’s just that small.

Jesus tells us that
with that little bit of faith—that small amount of real faith—we can tell a
mulberry tree, “be uprooted and planted in the sea.” In other words, those of us who are afraid
that a whole lot of doubt can overwhelm that little bit of faith have nothing
to worry about. Because even a little
bit of faith—even a mustard seed of faith—is more powerful than an ocean of
doubt. A little seed of faith is the
most powerful thing in the world, because that tiny amount of faith will drive
us and push us and motivate us to do incredible things. And doing those things, spurred on and
nourished by that little bit of faith, does make a difference in the world. Even
if we have 99% of doubt and 1% of faith, that 1% wins out over the rest, again
and again.

We are going to doubt. We are going to sometimes gaze into that void and have a
hard time seeing, for certain—without any doubt—that God truly is there. And that’s all right to do.

But if we still go
on loving, if we still go on serving, if we still go on trying to bring the
sacred and holy into our midst and into this world even in the face of that 99%
of doubt, that is our mustard seed of faith at work. That is what it means to
be a Christian. That is what loving God
and loving our neighbor as ourselves does. It furthers the Kingdom of God in
our midst, even when we might be doubting that there is even a Kingdom of God.

Now, yes, I understand that it’s weird to hear a priest get up here and say
that atheists and agnostics and other doubters can teach us lessons about
faith. But they can. I think God does work in that way sometimes. I have no
doubt that God can increase our faith my any means necessary, even despite our
doubts. I have no doubt that God can work even in the mustard-sized faith found
deep within someone who is an atheist.

And if God can do
that in the life and example of an atheist, imagine what God can do in our
lives—in us, who are committed Christians who stand up every Sunday in church
and profess our faiths in the Creed we are about to recite together.

So, let us cultivate that mustard-sized faith inside us. Let’s not fret over
how small it is. Let’s not worry about
weighing it on the scale against the doubt in our lives. Let’s not despair over how small it is. Let’s fear doubt. Let us not be scared of our
natural agnosticism. Rather, let us realize that even that mustard seed of
faith within us can do incredible things in our lives and in the lives of those
around us. And in doing those small
things, we all are bringing the Kingdom of God into our midst.

About Me

Jamie Parsley is an Episcopal priest & poet. He is the author of twelve books of poems. In 2004, he was named an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota. He currently serves as the Priest-in-Charge of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Fargo, North Dakota.